What I'm Doing. What I'm Thinking. What I'm Writing.

Mike Daisey and Doing the Right Thing

After gestating on the matter for five days, I finally put down in words my thoughts on Mike Daisey, the monologuist who, it was recently revealed, fabricated much of his recent one-man-show The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Many people felt duped by the performance, in which Daisey tells of the abused and underage workers he met while visiting an Apple supplier in China and then implores his audience to spread his tale. I felt particularly angry, since Daisey made these claims, to my face, when I interviewed him for an in-depth feature story for City Arts. I tried to temper that anger, but it is still very much there.

So, that's my professional response, but my emotions are much more complex than that. Despite feeling deceived, I also feel a tremendous amount of empathy for Daisey. Like every other serious storyteller, both Mike Daisey and I have stood at a common crossroads.

The night before the news of Daisey's mass deception broke, I found myself at that crossroads again. The final deadline for submitting changes to my book about the independent record label K Records was the next day. At this point I should have been focused only on crossing any uncrossed "t"s, dotting any undotted "i"s. But there was an elephant in the room, one that had been lingering for months.

The book is not a work of muckraking journalism. It is a collection of stories told to me by trustworthy witnesses, stitched together in a smooth narrative. When I uncovered contentious issues, I tried my best to speak with both sides. In some cases I was able to suss out a truth I was confident in; other times I presented both sides of the story as equally plausible. Sometimes, in order to achieve that smooth narrative, I had to revisit my sources and dig deeper into my primary source material to find the connective tissue. Connecting the dots, I called it. That's what I was doing for the last four months of the writing process: connecting the dots.

But there was one pair of dots that were embarrassingly far apart. The connective tissue I used to bring them together was not fabricated out of thin air--it was available in various locations on the Internet, provided with no primary source. But it was tenuous and weak, more tissue paper than Teflon. It held until that final night. And then, it tore. Frantic, I finally talked to my girlfriend about it.

"Just say that it's a rumor," she said about the suspect story. "Say that it has spread on the Internet."

I resisted. "I don't do that anywhere else in the book," I said, pointing out that I manage to avoid talking about the Internet until it actually appears in the story, a full five years after the event in question. "It will destroy the narrative flow."

This, I imagine, is the same argument that Daisey told himself, and perhaps his wife, when he contemplated the fibs in his deeply flawed work. "It will destroy the narrative." So when Daisey appeared on This American Life and admited that he had fabricated much of his story--a story that the radio program, like me, had spread to its audience--one part in particular cooled my anger and replaced it with a pained empathy.

"Did you ever worry that this would be discovered?" asked the show's host, Ira Glass.

"I worried about it all the time," Daisey replied. "It made me sick."

I knew that feeling. I had felt it for the previous two months. The thought that I was presenting a possible lie as truth--even if the potential lie wasn't one I created--sat in my stomach like a rock. As time wore on, the muscle around that rock was rubbed raw and grew into a festering wound.

As much as I disliked the idea of tampering with the narrative, the thought of living with that feeling, the feeling that I imagine has become an integral part of Daisey's work, was unimaginable. After my initial resistence, I took my girlfriend's suggestion. I disrupted my narrative. How I managed it I will not say, but I did spit that rock out.

I wish Daisey would have done the same. Maybe I wouldn't have written about him, but I could respect him.